Friday, February 20, 2009

A Spike in Visits

Obviously I haven't posted anything in a while, so when I checked my Google Analytics report to see what my traffic looked like, I wasn't surprised to see it hovering around 12 visits-per-day. Even on the days I post something new, and send an alert via e-mail and Facebook, I rarely get more than 35 visits in a single day.

But then on Monday, out of nowhere, I had 113 visitors. Sweet!

Naturally I was curious how this happened. The report indicated that the post receiving the most hits that day, by far, was the summary of results from my Blue Pen vs. Black Pen, published two months ago.

Turns out my poll results were discovered and talked about on the Fountain Pen Network --- a discussion forum for ink and fountain pen fanatics. To be sure, my article did not generate nearly the level of in-depth discussion that many other topics on the FPN do, but I was flattered just the same.

My traffic has already returned to normal levels, but this was an exciting blip, and gives me hope that in the future other posts might get spontaneously "picked up" by various online networks, be they discussion forums, e-mail networks, or just other blogs with more activity than the serene pond that is Ink and Beans.